> Apparently, the hardware could do it by the early eighties. Ampex's ADO and the digital video effects boxes that followed could scale and reposition a live signal in real time

Fun history: The very first digital squeeze effect box was called the Squeezoom by Vital and released in 1977 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US4266242A). It made big waves when first seen on national TV during a live Grammy awards ceremony putting camera shots of all four nominees into a 'quad-split'. Prior to the Squeezoom, quad-splits were faked using an analog video switcher to simply crop four full-screen images into quarters. No pixels were shrunk or even moved, instead, each of the four images were framed by the camera operator in their respective corners with the camera's optical zoom lens.

Digitally scaling a video frame in real-time was quite a feat with late 70s TTL chips which were barely fast enough to keep up with full bandwidth 6 Mhz video rates by using costly delay lines and buffers pushing the Squeezoom's price to $250K (over $1,000,000 today), However the trickiest part was implementing high-quality multi-tap filters to smooth the scaled pixels in real-time. While the Squeezoom was first, won an Emmy for technical achievement and established the term "Squeeze", it was also legendary not only for its cost but for being cantankerous and unreliable.

The Ampex Digital Optics (ADO) shipped in 1981 and got even more attention because the Squeezoom which could only scale images in X and Y but the ADO could simulate 2.5D perspective with affine transforms. It's worth reading the patent just to appreciate how the hell they did it with 1980 TTL chips (https://patents.google.com/patent/US4472732/). Here's the demo video for the 2nd gen ADO 100 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw1JrNBroF8&t=160s).

A year later later Quantel introduced the their $300k Mirage effects unit which could warp live video onto a nearly arbitrary 3D geometric shape, however the trick was it pre-rendered all the geometric remapping coordinates to a massive RAM disk using a Pascal program running on a workstation (which could take an hour or more to calculate) and only played them back on cue. The real-time part of the Mirage's hardware just digitized live video input and mapped it to the fixed stream of pre-generated addresses mapping 2D video X/Y to 3D X/Y/Z. Thus the Mirage could apply complex effects to live video but the effect geometry had to be canned, not interactive. The Ampex Digital Optics hardware did generate addresses in real-time entirely in logic-gate based hardware and as the geometries became more complex and effects like shadows, trails, reflections, specular highlights and multiple colored light sources became targets these esoteric real-time broadcast video effects systems were some of the first steps toward GPUs.

The ultimate real-time 3D video warping effects box was Sony's legendy $350,000 System-G which shipped in 1992 and reportedly had worldwide sales of... three units. A young engineer at Sony named Ken Kutaragi saw the early System-G prototype in the lab and imagined that esoteric hardware could be amazing for games - and a few years later Kutaragi launched Sony's Playstation development effort with some former System-G engineers. In fact, the history of real-time digital effects for TV is full of notable names from early computer graphics and video games. Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith were at Ampex in the late 70s and Lucasfilm in the early 80s before co-founding Pixar. Two young Ampex engineers named Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney 'borrowed' parts from work to prototype early gam...